Probuphine is an expensive medication used to treat opioid dependence by providing maintenance treatment and lessening withdrawal symptoms. The U.S. federal government also has considerable leverage over the pricing of this product, because of the federal funding of the the research that lead to the sole Orange Book patent on the product, and phase 3 trials that were used the register the product.
Workshop: Patents, the Public Interest and Two New Medical Technologies: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR), Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CAR) technologies
On September 15th, 2017, Knowledge Ecology International will be hosting a workshop on: “Patents, the Public Interest and Two New Medical Technologies: CRISPR and CAR T.”
If you are unable to attend in person, a livestream of the event will be available here
(More on government funded inventions here. Other KEI comments on NIH licenses are found here.) Attached are the August 8, 2017 KEI comments regarding the prospective grant of an exclusive patent license by the NIH to Salubris Biotherapuetics for the development of… Continue Reading
On August 8, 2017, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) submitted comments on the proposed grant of an exclusive license from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to Salubris Biotherapuetics, Inc, a corporation headquartered in Guangdong, China, for an important new technology that could be used Continue Reading
(More on government funded inventions here. Other KEI comments on NIH licenses are found here.) On July 10, 2017, the NIH issued a notice on “Prospective Grant of Exclusive Patent License: Composition and Methods for Delivering Inhibitory Oligonucleotides for the Treatment of… Continue Reading
25 July 2017
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Kim Treanor, kim.treanor@keionline.org or +1 (202) 332-2670
Washington, 25 July 2017 – Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have sent a letter today to the Command Judge Advocate of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC), recommending two specific contractual terms for the proposed license of the US Army’s Zika vaccine technology to Sanofi Pasteur.
(More on government funded inventions here. Other KEI comments on NIH licenses are found here.) In 2016, the NIH signed a CRADA with NantBioScience, a company lead by Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD. to develop “Further Develop Recombinant NK Cells and Monoclonal Antibodies as… Continue Reading
On 19 July 2017, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) introduced an amendment at the markup in the U.S. House Appropriations Committee of the FY2018 State and Foreign Operations, Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations bill that would direct the Department of Health and Human Services to use its authority to break patent monopolies for government-funded inventions priced higher in the U.S. than seven other high-income countries.
The report of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018, S. 1519, published July 10, 2017, includes a directive that links exclusive patent rights to the prices of drugs, vaccines and other medical technologies that are based upon DoD-funded inventions.
The text of the directive, approved unanimously by the full Senate Armed Services Committee, is as follows: